Dewey’s Aesthetics

John Dewey is well known for his work in logic, scientific inquiry,
and philosophy of education. His fame is based largely on his
membership in the school of American Pragmatists of which Charles
Sanders Peirce and William James were the leading early figures. He
has also had a great deal of influence in aesthetics and the
philosophy of art. His work Art as Experience (1934) is
regarded by many as one of the most important contributions to this
area in the 20th century. Yet it is not as widely discussed
as that evaluation would indicate. There are several reasons for this.

First, although Dewey seems to write in an almost folksy style, his
philosophical prose is often difficult and dense. Second, the book
early on had the misfortune of receiving two reviews that negatively
impacted its reception. The first, by an avowed follower, Stephen
Pepper, complained that it was not truly pragmatist and that Dewey had
reverted to an earlier Hegelianism (Pepper 1939). The second, by
Benedetto Croce, seemed to confirm this (Croce 1948). Croce, widely
seen as Hegelian himself, saw so many similarities between Dewey's
work and his own that he accused Dewey of lifting his ideas. Dewey
(1948) insisted otherwise, but the sense that there was something too
Hegelian in Art as Experience remained. This did not stop
many philosophers, educators, and other intellectuals from producing
works in aesthetic theory that were strongly influenced by Dewey. Even
before Art as Experience Dewey's writings on aesthetics and
art influenced, and were influenced by, such writers as: Mary Mullen
(1923), who taught seminars on aesthetics and was Associate Director
of Education for the Barnes Foundation; Lawrence Buermeyer (1924), who
was another Associate Director of Education at the Barnes Foundation;
Albert Barnes (1928); and Thomas Munro (1928). After the book's
publication his followers included Irwin Edman (1939), Stephen Pepper
(1939, 1945, 1953), Horace Kallen (1942), Thomas Munro again (numerous
books) and Van Meter Ames (1947, 1953). Art historian Meyer Schapiro
was one of his students.

However, in the 1950s there was an analytic revolution in
English-speaking aesthetics. Prior aesthetic theories were considered
to be too speculative and unclear. Dewey's work was caught up in this
condemnation. Arnold Isenberg (1987, orig. 1950) for instance, in a
founding document of analytic aesthetics, dismissed Art as
Experience as a “hodgepodge of conflicting methods and
undisciplined speculations,” (p. 128) although he found it full
of profound suggestions. Dewey's theories of expression and creativity
were particular targets of analytic attack. Dewey's was among the
views singled out in a general critique of expression as a defining
characteristic of art, although often his own distinctive theory was
ignored in the process. A situation followed, and continued well into
the 1980s, in which, according to one editor of The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Dewey's aesthetics was virtually
ignored (Fisher 1989). While Monroe Beardsley, one of the most
important late 20th century aestheticians, kept an interest
in Dewey alive (1958, 1975, 1982), particularly in his discussions of
aesthetic experience, other major figures, including Arthur Danto,
Mary Mothersill and Richard Wollheim, completely ignored him. Nelson
Goodman may be a partial exception (Freeland 2001). Goodman certainly
shared with Dewey a conviction that art and science are close in many
ways and, like Dewey, he replaced the question “what is
art?” with “when is art?” They also both took a
naturalist approach to the arts. However, Goodman, who never refers to
Dewey in his Languages of Art (1976), saw art in terms of
languages and other symbol systems, whereas Dewey saw it in terms of
experience. Joseph Margolis (1980) is perhaps the most important
contemporary aesthetician coming out of the analytic school to take
Dewey seriously, having a natural affinity to pragmatist ways of
thought. His idea that works of art are culturally emergent but
physically embodied entities is Deweyan in spirit, as is his
insistence on a robust relativist theory of interpretation. However,
Margolis seldom refers to Dewey and, although he believes himself
closer to Dewey's “Hegelianism” than to Peirce's
“Kantianism,” he finds Peirce more interesting. He also
faults Dewey for not being an historicist (1999). Another contemporary
American aesthetician, Arnold Berleant, has continuously developed
themes similar to Dewey's, for example, in his concepts of the
“aesthetic field” and “engagement.”
(1970,1991).

The relative lack of interest in Dewey changed for several reasons in
the late 1970s. First, Richard Rorty turned analytic philosophy on its
head by advocating a return to pragmatism (Rorty 1979, 1982). In this,
Dewey was one of his avowed heroes. Unfortunately, Rorty was not a
close reader of Dewey's aesthetics. The Society for the Advancement of
American Philosophy along with their publication, The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, as well as the Center for Dewey Studies
also contributed to this revival. Dewey was further promoted in
aesthetics through the work of Richard Shusterman (1992, 1997a, 2000)
who went so far as to advocate a pragmatist aesthetics, with Dewey as
his main champion. He particularly emphasized the possibilities of
treating popular art as fine art with his well-known example of rap as
fine art. He also extended aesthetics into the realm of everyday life
through his concept of “somaesthetics.” This strand of
pro-Deweyan thinking has also been recently pursued by Crispin
Sartwell in response to multi-culturalism and everyday aesthetics
(Sartwell 1995, 2003) and by Yuriko Saito (Saito 2007) in her effort
to extend aesthetics to everyday life. Dewey's aesthetics finally
received an excellent exposition in the work of Thomas Alexander
(Alexander 1987). Alexander developed his ideas further in a book on
eco-ontology and the aesthetics of existence (Alexander 2013). Mark
Johnson developed Dewey's anti-dualism and the aesthetics of human
understanding (Johnson 2007). Meanwhile, there has been a steady
interest in Dewey's aesthetics in the philosophy of education, with
articles appearing on a regular basis in such publications as the
Journal of Aesthetic Education and Studies in the
Philosophy of Education and several books (Jackson 1998, Garrison
1997, Greene 2001, Maslak 2006, Granger 2006a).

Dewey's renewed influence was due in part to increased interest in
various continental aestheticians. The similarities between Dewey and
Merleau-Ponty are the most striking (Ames 1953, Kestenbaum 1977), but
he also shares certain features with Gadamer (Gilmour 1987, who also
notes important differences, and Jeannot 2001). Given his critique of
capitalism, one can also find connections between his thinking and
that of Marxist aestheticians, particularly Adorno (Lysaker 1998), although there are important differences as well as similarities, especially where Adorno advocates the autonomy of art while Dewey stresses continuity (Lewis 2005, Eldridge 2010).
Some contemporary feminist aestheticians have come to realize that
Dewey shares many of their concerns, for example their rejection of
mind/body dualism, their democratic instincts, their contextualism,
and their tendency to break down traditional distinctions (Seigfried
1996b, Duran 2001). There has also been some work on marked
similarities between Dewey's aesthetic thought and that of Taoism
(Grange 2001), Transcendental Meditation (Zigler 1982), Dogen's
version of Zen (Earls 1992), the great Indian aesthetician,
Abhinavagupta (Mathur 1981), the Bhagavad-Gita (Stroud 2009), and
Confucius (Shusterman 2009, Man 2007, Mullis 2005, Grange 2004).
Alexander has recently discussed relations between Dewey and Eastern
Aesthetics generally (Alexander 2009)

An interesting aspect of Dewey's writing, and perhaps another reason
for the lack of on-going positive reception, was his lack of strong
interest in the history of aesthetics. He seldom explicated or
critiqued the aesthetic works of others. Although full of quotations,
Art as Experience originally lacked adequate footnotes.
(Fortunately, the recent Boydston edition tracks down all quotations,
and even notes which books were in Dewey's library.) Poets figure as
strongly in Dewey's reading list as philosophers, especially
Coleridge, Housman, Keats, Poe, Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Visual
artists are often quoted, especially Cezanne, Constable, Delacroix,
Manet, Matisse (whom he met), Reynolds, and Van Gogh. As for
philosophers, he was of course aware of the work of Plato and
Aristotle. Yet in Art as Experience he never mentions Hume's
aesthetics, Hegel receives only one citation (surprisingly, given the
accusation that Dewey was too Hegelian), and Nietzsche none. Kant,
however, plays an important role as an opponent, and Schopenhauer
receives a few mentions. Amongst contemporaries, he references Matthew
Arnold, Clive Bell, Bernard Bosanquet, Andrew Bradley, Benedetto
Croce, Roger Fry, Thomas Hulme, Violet Paget (who wrote under the name
Vernon Lee), Walter Pater, George Santayana, Hippolyte Taine, and Leo
Tolstoy.

Since Dewey was a pragmatist it is worthwhile to look for antecedents
in that tradition (see Shusterman 2006b). A strong case can be made
for many parallels with Emerson, whom many see as a proto-pragmatist.
Charles S. Peirce also touched on themes more familiar in Dewey, for
example the continuity of aesthetics and ethics. Although William
James did not write in aesthetics, his psychological views had a
strong influence on Dewey's aesthetics. Alain Locke, the
African-American philosopher and pragmatist culture-theorist, probably
had some influence as well.

Other important thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries also
influenced Dewey. His idea of the live creature interacting with its
environment owes much to Charles Darwin (Perricone 2006), and although
he never cites Karl Marx, perhaps because he was so committed in his
public life to defending an anti-communist form of social liberalism,
his views on the relation between art and society were very close to
those of Marx, especially the young Marx. Another figure hovering in
the background was Sigmund Freud for, although Dewey is sometimes
critical of Freud's hypostatization of entities within the
unconscious, in Art as Experience he gives
subconscious processes a significant role in the creative
process.

Albert C. Barnes, the industrialist and collector, was Dewey's
strongest influence in aesthetics. The two were close friends, and
Dewey was a member of the staff of the Barnes Foundation of which he
was named Director in 1925 (Barnes Foundation 2011). Barnes, who took
a seminar under Dewey in 1917, avidly advocated Dewey's form of
pragmatism. He considered himself a strong defender of democracy,
although ironically, he made it very difficult for people to see his
own extensive collection and was thought by some to be authoritarian
in his formalist theories of appreciation. Dewey not only quotes
extensively from Barnes' writings but dedicates Art as
Experience to him. Many of the illustrations in Dewey's book came
from the Barnes collection.

Dewey was ahead of his time in his devotion to multiculturalism. The
selection of illustrations Dewey chose for Art as Experience
included Pueblo Indian pottery, Bushmen rock-painting, Scythian
ornament, and African sculpture, as well as works by El Greco, Renoir,
Cezanne and Matisse. He was interested in traditional and folk arts in
Mexico, admiring the designs of the rural schools over those of the
cities (1926c). He was also associated, mainly through Barnes, with
African-American culture. Barnes was invited to write a chapter for
The New Negro edited by Alain Locke (Locke 1925). The New
Negro was one of the founding documents of the Harlem
Renaissance. The students in Dewey's and Barnes' first experimental
classes in art education were mainly from the black working class.
Barnes collected African-American art and also encouraged
African-American students to study at the Barnes Foundation.
African-American painter and illustrator Aaron Douglas, who came to
the foundation in 1927, studied in Paris in 1931 under a Foundation
fellowship (Jubilee 1982). Barnes also had a long association with
Lincoln University, a historically black college, many students of
which studied at the Barnes Foundation (Hollingsworth 1994). Dewey was
also one of the founding members of the NAACP (National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People). Dewey also sought to promote
cross-cultural understanding through his founding of the China
Institute in New York City in 1926. The China Institute, which
continues today, advertises itself as the only institution in that
city to focus solely on Chinese civilization, art and culture. Hu
Shih, a student of Dewey's at Columbia and one of the leading figures
in the creation of the Institute, invited him to Peking in 1919. (Ho
2004—see the Other Internet Resources).

Although Dewey was widely versed in literature, architecture,
painting, sculpture, and the theater, he was relatively uneducated in
music, and he was said to be tone-deaf. Yet he often had insightful
things to say about music, and many musicians and music educators have
drawn inspiration from his theory (e.g., Zeltner 1975). He seemed,
unfortunately, to have been totally unaware of both photography and
film as separate art forms.

Many writers complain that Dewey showed little interest in the
avant-garde art of his time (for example, Eldridge 2010). It is true
that neither Cubism, Dadaism nor Surrealism play a role in his
writing, and his theory seems to actually preclude Non-objective
painting (Jacobson 1960), although he does speak positively of
abstract art. Nor did he refer much to such innovative poets as
T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. Although this may indicate a conservative
approach to the arts, he nonetheless had considerable influence on
various innovative art movements both in his own time and
later. Perhaps most significantly, the director of the Federal Art
Project from 1935–1943, Holger Cahill, was a Dewey follower
(Mavigliano 1984). Amongst painters, Thomas Hart Benton, the
regionalist realist, was an early convert to his philosophy. Dewey was
also on the board of Black Mountain College. BMC was influential in
the arts, with students such as Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Josef
Albers, an important painting teacher there, was first influenced by
Dewey's educational theory and later by his aesthetics. (Gosse,
2012)

In Mexico, Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, or open-air painting
schools, began during the Mexican Revolution and achieved an
established structure under the government of Alvaro Obregon
(1920–24). They were promoted by Alfredo Ramos Martinez who was
inspired by Dewey. (Dictionary of Art and Artist 2011—see Other
Internet Resources)

Turning to late 20th century artists, Dewey's influence on Abstract
Expressionism was especially strong (Buettner 1975, Berube 1998). For
example, Robert Motherwell, who studied Art as Experience
when he was a philosophy major at Stanford, considered it to be one of
his bibles (Berube 1998). Donald Judd, the Minimalist sculptor, read
and admired Dewey (Raskin 2010). Earth Art, with its emphases on
getting art out of the museum, might even be seen as applied Dewey.
There is also reason to believe that Allan Kaprow, one of the
originators of Happenings and Performance Art, read Dewey and drew on
his ideas (Kelly 2003). Although one author has argued that
contemporary Body Art has moved away from the integrated consummated
aesthetic experience Dewey commends (Jay 2002), another argues that
Dewey anticipates this movement (Brodsky 2002).

Dewey's methodology may be off-putting to readers trained in analytic
philosophy. He was not much given to argument. (See Aldrich 1944, for
a partial defense of Dewey's philosophical method.) However, he did
give reasons for rejecting other leading theories in the field. Nor
was he adverse to public debate in philosophical journals. Given his
emphasis on experience, his method was somewhat similar to that of
phenomenologists in the tradition of Edmund Husserl. Yet, unlike
Husserl, he was strongly committed to a scientific world-view and did
not bracket scientific knowledge in his search for philosophical
understanding. His anti-dualism would have also made him hostile to
Husserl's Cartesian tendencies. This same anti-dualism meant that he
was constantly engaged in undercutting distinctions. It is not
surprising then that he did not follow the method of contemporary
analytic philosophy of progressively making more and more subtle
distinctions in the search for precise definition. Because of his
undercutting of distinctions, his thinking can sometimes seem similar
to the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida (Derrida 1976). However,
unlike Derrida, Dewey would never claim that there is nothing
“outside the text,” since the starting point of his
philosophy was always the live creature in its environment. Also his
emphasis on continuity and his commitment to organicism exhibit a
typically modernist belief in harmonious wholes that was not shared by
Derrida or by postmodernists generally. Nor would he have accepted
Derrida's one-sided insistence on the importance of differences and
deferral as found in his idea of différance. Dewey
could be seen as against method if method is seen as requiring
certainty, but not if it focuses on probability. He did share with
analytic philosophy a tendency to back up his points with appeals to
common sense and to the meanings of words. In evaluating Dewey's
method one must also take into account his considered views on the
logic of inquiry as expressed in several books which will be reviewed
in other articles in this encyclopedia.

Art as Experience, Dewey's greatest work in aesthetics, had
its antecedents. There were scattered short essays and remarks on
aesthetics and art in the 1880s (Dewey 1896, 1897) as well as
significant discussion in his Psychology (Dewey 1887). Some
discussion appears in Democracy and Education (Dewey 1915)
and in his other works on education. He also published a few short
articles on aesthetics in the publication of the Barnes foundation in
1925 and 1926 (Dewey 1927). Dewey laid out the beginnings of a theory
of aesthetic experience in his major work, Experience and
Nature (Dewey 1925a). There are also two important essays in
Philosophy and Civilization (Dewey 1931) that address
aesthetics. These are all described in the supplementary document

As much as there is fascinating preliminary material in his earlier
writings the primary goal of none of these was an aesthetics or a
theory of art. Moreover, the understanding of the arts in these
writings is relatively primitive compared to Art as
Experience. Not only is the density of thought and insight in the
later work much greater, but the writing is much clearer. Also, only
in the later work do we get a full account of the phenomenology of
aesthetic and artistic experience. The explication of this book will
follow Dewey's own chapter headings. Explication of some additional
chapters can be found in “Additional Materials on Dewey's
Aesthetics” (see the link in Other Internet Resources).

Dewey somewhat surprisingly begins this work with the claim that the
very existence of works of art hinders any aesthetic theory that seeks
to understand them. Art products exist externally and physically,
whereas, on his view, the work of art is really what the physical
object does within experience. Also the classic status of
many works of art isolates them from the conditions within which they
came to be, and hence from their experiential function. The business
of aesthetics is to restore the continuity between the refined
experiences that are works of art and the experiences of everyday
life. We must, in short, turn away from artistic products to ordinary
experience. To understand the Parthenon, which is widely believed to
be a great work of art, one must turn to cultural context of Athens
and the lives of the citizens who were expressing their civic religion
through its creation.

Dewey then argues that we must begin with the aesthetic “in the
raw” in order to understand the aesthetic “refined.”
To do this we must turn to the events and scenes that interest the
man-in-the-street such as the sounds and sights of rushing
fire-engines, the grace of a baseball player, and the satisfactions of
a housewife. We find then that the aesthetic begins in happy
absorption in activity, for example in our fascination with a fire in
a hearth as we poke it. Similarly, Dewey holds that an intelligent
mechanic who does his work with care is “artistically
engaged.” If his product is not aesthetically appealing this
probably has more to do with market conditions that encourage
low-quality work than with his abilities.

This move to the everyday entails recognition of the aesthetic nature
of the popular arts. Average folk may be repelled by the thought that
they enjoy their casual recreation in part for aesthetic reasons. They
do not realize that what has life for them, such as movies, jazz, the
comics, and sensational newspaper stories, is art. Relegating art to
the museum comes with separating it from the experiences of everyday
life. Fine art fails to appeal to the masses when it is remote, and so
they seek aesthetic pleasure in “the vulgar.” The cause of
this is the common separation between spirit and matter, and the
consequent downgrading of matter.

There are, however, still people in the world who admire whatever
intensifies immediate experience. Practices and artifacts from
traditional cultures were, in their original contexts, enhancements of
everyday life. Dance, pantomime, music, and architecture were
originally connected with religious rites, not with theaters and
museums. In prehistoric cultures the various arts consummated the
meaning of the community. This is also true for contemporary
traditional cultures.

The segregation of art from everyday life came with the rise of
nationalism and imperialism. The Louvre began as a place to house
Napoleon's loot. The rise of capitalism, with its valuation of rare
and costly objects, also contributed to the development of the museum,
as did the need to show good taste in an increasingly materialist
world.

For Dewey, experience should be understood in terms of the conditions
of life. Man shares with animals certain basic vital needs, and
derives the means for satisfying these needs from his animal nature.
Life goes on not only in an environment but in interaction
with that environment. The live creature uses its organs to
interact with the environment through defense and conquest. Every need
is a lack of adequate adjustment to the environment, and also a demand
to restore adjustment—and each recovery is enriched by
resistance met and overcome.

Life overcomes and transforms factors of opposition to achieve higher
significance. Harmony and equilibrium are the results not of
mechanical processes but of rhythmic resolution of tension. The
rhythmic alternation within the live creature between disunity and
unity becomes conscious in humans. Emotion signifies breaks in
experience which are then resolved through reflective action. Objects
become interesting as conditions for realizing harmony. Thought is
then incorporated into them as their meaning.

The artist, especially, cultivates resistance and tension to achieve a
unified experience. By contrast, although the scientist, like the
artist, is interested in problems, she always seeks to move on to the
next problem. Yet both artist and scientist are concerned with the
same materials, both think, and both have their aesthetic moments. The
aesthetic moment for the scientist happens when her thought becomes
embedded as meaning in the object. The artist's thought is more
immediately embodied in the object as she works and thinks in her
medium.

Emotions are not merely in the mind. The live animal confronts a
nature which already has emotional qualities. Aspects of nature may
be, for example, irritating or comforting. Nature has such qualities
even before it has mathematical or secondary qualities. Direct
experience is a function of man/nature interaction in which human
energy is constantly transformed.

Aesthetic experience involves a drama in which action, feeling, and
meaning are one. The result is balance. Such experience would not
occur in a world of mere flux in which there was no cumulative change.
Nor would it occur in a world that is finished, for then there would
be no resolution or fulfillment. It is only possible in a world in
which the live being loses and reestablishes equilibrium with its
environment.

Passing from disturbance to harmony provides man's most intense
experience. Happiness is the result of a deep fulfillment in which our
whole being has adjusted to the environment. Any such consummation is
also a new beginning. In happiness, an underlying harmony continues
through the rhythmic phases of conflict and resolution. Dewey
contrasts a life in which the past is a burden to one that sees it as
a resource that can be used to inform the present. In this instance,
the future is a promise that surrounds the present as an aura. Happy
periods, in which memories and anticipations are absorbed into the
present, are an aesthetic ideal. Art celebrates these moments with
peculiar intensity.

Dewey held that the sources of aesthetic experience are to found in
sub-human animal life. Animals often attain a unity of experience that
we lose in our fragmented work-lives. The live animal is fully present
with all its senses active, especially when it is graceful. It
synthesizes past and future in the present. Similarly, tribal man is
most alive when most observant and filled with energy. He does not
separate observation, action, and foresight. His senses are not mere
pathways for storage. Rather, they prepare him for thought and action.
Experience signifies heightened life and active engagement with the
world. In its highest form it involves an identification of self and
world. Such experience is the beginning of art.

Theorists have often supposed that ethereal meanings and values are
inaccessible to sense. This presupposes a nature/spirit dualism which
Dewey rejects. That people commonly resist connecting fine art and
everyday life is explained by the current disorganization of our
cultural lives. This disorder is hidden by the apparent order
of social classes and the compartmentalization of life in which
religion, morals, politics and art all have separate domains. In this
state practice and insight, as well as imagination and doing, are kept
separate.

Dewey thought that the economic institutions of his time
(1930s—the Depression) encouraged these separations. Under these
conditions, sensations are mere mechanical stimuli that do not tell us
anything about the reality behind them, and the various senses operate
in isolation from each other. Moralists, at least, see sense as
closely related to emotion and appetite. Unfortunately, they see the
sensuous as identical with the sensual, and the sensual with the
lewd.

The sense organs are carried to their full realization through sense
itself, i.e., through meaning embodied in experience. The world is
made actual in the qualities so experienced. Here, meaning cannot be
separated from action, will, or thought. Experience is not only the
result of interaction of subject and world, but also the subject's
reward when it transforms interaction into participation. Dualisms of
mind and body, by contrast come from a fear of life.

Dewey thinks it important here to distinguish mere recognition from
perception. Recognition uses matter as means. Perception, by contrast,
entails the past being carried into the present to enrich its content.
A life that involves merely labeling things is not really conscious.
The conscious activity of man develops out of a cooperation of
internal needs and external materials that results in a culminating
event. Man converts cause and effect into means and end, and thereby
makes organic stimulation the bearer of meaning.

Rather than reducing the human to the animal, Dewey holds that man
takes the unity of sense and impulse of animal life and infuses it
with conscious meaning through communication. Human is more complex
than animal life: for humans there are more opportunities for
resistance and tension, for invention, and for depth of insight and
feeling. The rhythms of struggle and consummation are more varied and
long-lasting, and the fulfillments are more intense.

Space and time are also different. For humans, space is not just a
void filled with dangers and opportunities. It is a scene for their
doings and undergoings. Time, also, is not a mere continuum, but an
organized medium of the rhythms of impulse and the processes of
growth. These involve pauses and completions that themselves begin new
developmental processes. It is form in art that makes clear the
organization of space and time in life experience.

In art, man uses the materials and energies of nature to expand life.
Art is proof that man can consciously restore the union of sensation,
needs, and actions found in animal life. Consciousness adds
regulation, selection and variation to this process. The idea of art
is, then, humanity's greatest accomplishment. The Greeks distinguished
order from matter, and man from the rest of nature, by way of art.
Art, for them, was the guiding ideal for humankind. For Dewey,
historically, science was developed as a means to generate other arts,
and ultimately it is only their handmaiden.

Although it is sometimes helpful to distinguish between fine and
useful art, Dewey thinks this extrinsic to art itself. What makes the
work “fine” is that the artist lived fully while producing
it. Fine art involves completeness of living in perception and making.
Whether the thing is put to use is irrelevant. That most utensils
today are non-aesthetic is because of the unhappy conditions of their
production and consumption.

Dewey thought that those who reject the continuity between everyday
experience and fine art fail to see that matter is needed to realize
ideals. Nature is man's habitat, and culture endures because men find
a support for it in nature. Culture results from prolonged, cumulative
interaction with the environment. We deeply respond to art because of
its connection with both cultural and natural experience.

Rather than giving art primacy in aesthetic, Dewey believes that
humans only feel properly alive when absorbing the aesthetic features
of nature. Aesthetic experience of the natural environment can even
take the form of ecstatic communion. This is due to ancient habits
gained in the relations between the living being and its environment.
Sensuous experience can absorb into itself meanings and values that
are designated “ideal” or “spiritual.” Dewey
observes that belief that nature is full of spirits is closely tied to
poetry. The sensuous surfaces of things incorporate not only what is
given by the senses but the most profound insight. Many of the arts
originate in primitive rituals which were not simply intended as means
to get rain, etc., but for the enhancement of experience. Similarly
myth was not just an early form of science.

Dewey concludes that the idea of the supernatural is more a function
of the psychology that generates works of art than of science or
philosophy. This can be seen by the solemn processions and other
artistic phenomena in churches. Keats famously wrote “Beauty is
truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.” Dewey agrees that any reasoning that excludes
imagination and the embodiment of ideas in emotionally charged sense
cannot reach truth. For Keats, “truth” meant wisdom, which
in turn meant trust in the good. All we need to know then is the
insight of imagination exemplified in beauty. It is not surprising
then that moments of intense aesthetic perception were Keats's
ultimate solace. The philosophy of Keats, shared by Dewey, accepts
life with all its uncertainty and turns that experience into art.

This chapter is Dewey's most famous writing in aesthetics. Here he
defines the important concept of “an experience.”
“An experience” is one in which the material of
experience is fulfilled or consummated, as for example when a problem
is solved, or a game is played to its conclusion. Dewey contrasts this
with inchoate experience in which we are distracted and do not
complete our course of action. “An experience,”
is also marked off from other experiences, containing within itself an
individualizing quality. Dewey believes his talk of “an
experience” is in accord with everyday usage, even though it is
contrary to the way philosophers talk about experience. For Dewey,
life is a collection of histories, each with their own plots,
inceptions, conclusions, movements and rhythms. Each has a unique
pervading quality.

Dewey then proceeds to offer a more dramatic sense of
“an experience.” Two examples of this sort of
“an experience” are a quarrel with a friend and
that meal in Paris which seemed to capture all that food can be. In
“an experience” every part flows freely into what follows,
carrying with it what preceded without sacrificing its identity. The
parts are phases of an enduring whole. Nor are there any holes or
mechanical dead spots in an experience. Rather, there are
pauses that define its quality and sum up what has been undergone.

Works of art are important examples of “an
experience.” Here, separate elements are fused into a unity,
although, rather than disappearing, their identity is enhanced. The
unity of an experience, which is neither exclusively
emotional, practical, nor intellectual, is determined by a single
pervasive quality. Contra Locke and Hume, Dewey holds that the trains
of ideas in thought are not just linked by association, but involve
the development of an underlying quality. Conclusions in thought are
similar to the consummating phase of “an
experience.” Thinking has its own aesthetic quality. It differs
from art only in that its material consists of abstract symbols rather
than qualities. The experience of thinking satisfies us emotionally
because it is internally integrated, and yet no intellectual activity
is integrated in this way unless it has aesthetic quality. Thus, for
Dewey, there is no clear separation between the aesthetic and the
intellectual.

Dewey thought that practical action, too, can involve meaning growing
towards a consummation. The Greek concept of good conduct as graceful
is an example of the aesthetic in the moral. On the other hand, much
moral action has no aesthetic quality and is mere half-hearted
duty-following.

In aesthetic experience there is concern for the connection between
each incident in a series and what went before. Interest controls what
is selected or rejected in the developing experience. By contrast, in
non-aesthetic experience we drift, evade, and compromise. The
non-aesthetic is a function either of loose succession or mechanical
connection of parts. Since so much of experience is like one of these
we take this to be the norm and place aesthetic experience outside
everyday life. But no experience has unity without aesthetic
quality.

Still, Dewey does not hold “an experience” to be
co-extensive with aesthetic experience. Philosophical and scientific
inquiries can have aesthetic quality every bit as much as art. Their
parts may link to each other and move to consummation. The
consummation may even be anticipated and savored. However, such
experiences are mostly intellectual or practical in nature. Also,
whereas intellectual effort may be summarized in a “truth”
there is no such thing in art.

When Dewey says that every integral experience (another term for
“an experience”) moves to a close he means that
the energies within it have done the work they are supposed to do. An
element of “undergoing” or suffering may occur in this,
for incorporating what preceded can be painful, and yet the suffering
is part of the complete enjoyed experience.

Dewey holds that aesthetic quality is emotional. Emotions are not
static entities with no element of growth. When significant, they are
qualities of a complex changing experience, of a developing drama.
There are no separate things called emotions. Emotions, rather, are
aspects of events and objects. They are not, generally speaking,
private. They belong to a self concerned with movement and change.
Unlike automatic reflexes, they are parts of an on-going
situation.

Emotion is a cementing force that gives diverse things their
qualitative unity. This can give an experience aesthetic character.
For example, an employee interview can either be mechanical and
ordinary or can involve an interplay that turns it into an
experience. In the latter case, the events are connected, each
changing the underlying quality as they collectively move to
consummation. This may involve the employer's imaginative projection
of the character of the applicant onto the job, with resultant harmony
or conflict.

The structure of “an experience” goes as follows.
The subject undergoes something or some properties, these properties
determine his or her doing something, and the process continues until
the self and the object are mutually adapted, ending with felt
harmony. This even holds for the thinker interacting with his or her
ideas. When the doing and undergoing are joined in perception they
gain meaning. Meaning, in turn, is given depth through incorporating
past experience.

Excess of doing, or excess of undergoing, may interfere with
experience. For example, desire for action may lead to treating
resistance as mere obstacle and not as a moment for reflection. Also,
the undergoing may be valued without any perception of meaning. A
balance is required between doing and undergoing to achieve
an experience.

Dewey does not separate artistic practice from intellect. Intelligence
is what perceives the relation between doing and undergoing. The
artist thinks as intently as the scientist. Thus, thinking should not
be identified with using mathematical or verbal symbols. The artist
must respond intelligently to every brush stroke to know where she is
going. She must see each element in the creative process in relation
to the whole to be produced. The quality of her art depends on the
intelligence she brings to bear.

Dewey believed it unfortunate that no term covers the act of
production and the act of appreciation combined as one thing.
Perception and enjoyment of art are often seen as having nothing in
common with the creative act. The term “aesthetic” is
sometimes used to designate the entire field and sometimes just the
perceptual side. Once we see conscious experience as “doing and
undergoing” we can see the connection between the productive and
appreciative aspects of art. “Art” denotes the process of
making something out of physical material that can be perceived by one
of the senses. “Aesthetic” refers to experience as both
appreciative and perceptive. It is the side of the consumer. And yet,
production and consumption should not be seen as separate. Perfection
of production is in terms of the enjoyment of the consumer: it is not
a mere matter of technique or execution. Craftsmanship is only
artistic if it cares deeply about the subject matter and is
directed towards enjoyed perception.

Dewey believed that art brings together the same doing/undergoing
relation that makes an experience what it is. Something is
artistic when the qualities of the result control the process of
production. That the aesthetic experience is connected with the
experience of making can be seen in the fact that if we believed a
product to be of some primitive people, and then discovered that it
was a product of nature, it would be perceived differently. Aesthetic
satisfaction must be linked to the activity that gave rise to it. For
example the taste of the epicure includes qualities that depend on
reference to the manner of production of the thing enjoyed.

The process of artistic production is involved from the start with
perception. It entails sensitive awareness of the evolving object and
its aesthetic qualities. The artist ends the process when she
perceives directly that the product is good. The sensitivity of the
artist directs the continuous shaping and reshaping of the work. In
the creative process, hand and eye are intimately connected. Both act
as instruments of the live creature as a whole. When the potter's
actions for example are regulated by a series of perceptions, the bowl
is graceful.

The product is aesthetic only if the doing and undergoing are related
to form a perceptual whole. This occurs in imagination as well as in
observation. The artist must build up a coherent experience
continuously through constant change. Even when an author writes down
what she had already clearly conceived her work is not private: art is
made for public consumption. Similarly, the architect must think in
the medium. Even here, doings and perceptions interact and mutually
affect each other in imagination.

The activities of the perceiver are comparable to those of the
creator. Reception that is full perception, and not mere recognition,
is a series of responsive acts resulting in fulfillment. In
perception, consciousness becomes alive. Consciousness requires
implicit involvement of motor response throughout the organism, which
entails that the scene perceived be pervaded by emotion. Although this
phase of experience involves surrender, this can only be done through
controlled activity, not withdrawal. It is a “going-out”
of energy which is also a “plunging” into the
subject-matter.

We need apprenticeship to perceive great works of art. Aesthetic
experience of art requires a continuous interaction between the total
organism and the object. The typical guided tour in a museum does not
involve such interaction. In proper appreciation the beholder must
create her own experience in such a way as to include relations
similar to those perceived by the artist. Re-creation is required for
the object to be seen as a work of art. The beholder as well
as the producer selects and simplifies according to her interests,
gathering details into a whole.

The end of art is significant only as an integration of parts.
Dominant in aesthetic experience are the characteristics that cause
the experience to be integrated and complete. In integral experience
there is a dynamic form that involves growth. This form has three
stages: inception, development, and fulfillment. Aesthetic experience
converts resistances into movement towards a close. Experiencing is a
rhythm of intake and outgiving between which there are pauses each of
which, in turn, incorporates within itself the prior doing. Thus the
form of the whole is in each part. The consummation phase of
experience is not merely located at the end. For an artist is engaged
in completing her work at every stage of the process. And this
involves summing up what has gone before.

Dewey's theory of creativity is developed within the context of a
theory of expressive acts (Dewey 1934, Chapter 4). Leo Tolstoy had
featured expression in his theory of art and there are some
similarities between Dewey's handling and his. However Dewey begins
from a naturalist standpoint. His first move is to claim that every
experience begins as an impulsion. “Impulsion,” as
distinguished from “impulse,” is a developmental movement
of the whole organism in response to a need arising from
interaction with the environment, for example a craving for food. It
is the beginning stage of a complete experience, whereas impulse is
momentary, for example a tongue reacting to a sour taste.

For Dewey, the epidermis is only superficially the limit of the body.
In fact, various external things belong to, and are needed by, the
body. This includes not only such things as food and air, but tools
and other aspects of human culture. In short, the self depends on its
environment for its survival, and must secure its materials through
forays into the world. Because of this, the initial impulsion meets
things that oppose it. The self must convert these obstacles into
something useful, thus transforming its blind efforts into purpose and
meaning.

Impulsion becomes aware of itself only through overcoming obstacles.
When resistance generates curiosity and is overcome, the result is
elation. Emotion is then converted into both interest and reflective
action through assimilating meanings from the past. In this
re-creative act the impulsion gains form and solidity, and old
material is given new life. What would otherwise be either a smooth
passageway or an obstruction becomes a medium for creativity.

Not all outward activity is expression. Dewey insists that someone who
simply acts angrily is not expressing anger. What may seem
expressive to an outside observer because it tells us something about
the state of the person observed may not be expressive from the
standpoint of the subject. Mere “giving way” to impulsion
does not constitute expression. Expression requires clarification,
which for Dewey means an ordering of impulsion by way of incorporating
values of prior experiences. Although emotional discharge is necessary
for expression, it is not sufficient. To discharge is to get rid of,
whereas to express is to carry to completion.

A baby learns that it gains attention when it cries. As it becomes
aware of the meaning of its actions it performs those previously blind
acts on purpose. In this way, consequences are incorporated
as the meaning of future doings. The baby is then capable of
expression. Primitively spontaneous acts, for example smiles, are
thereby converted into means of rich human intercourse. Similarly, the
art of painting uses paint to express imaginative experience.

Dewey stresses that expression and art require material used as media.
An intrinsic connection exists between medium and the act of
expression. Tones only express emotion, and hence are musical, when
they occur in a medium of other tones, as when they are ordered in a
melody. “Expression” etymologically refers to a squeezing
out. Yet, even the expression of wine from a wine press is not a mere
discharge. It involves interaction between wine press and grapes to
transform primitive material into something expressed. The work of art
involves a building of experience out of interaction of various
conditions and energies in which the thing expressed is wrung from the
producer.

For Dewey, the act of expression is a construction in time. It is a
prolonged interaction of self and objective conditions that gives form
and order to both. The author only comes to recognize what he/she set
out to do with raw materials at the end of a process that began with
excitement about the subject matter. That excitement in turn stirs up
meanings based on prior experience. These, finally, enter a conscious
stage. The fire of inspiration results in either painful disruption or
the creation of a refined product in expressive action.

Dewey observes that inspiration has often been attributed to a muse or
god because it is based on unconscious sources. It involves inner
material finding objective fuel to burn. The act of expression brings
to completion the act of inspiration by means of this material. For an
impulsion to lead to expression there must be conflict, a place where
inner impulse meets the environment. The tribal war dance for example
requires the uncertainty of an impending raid for its excitement. The
emotion is not complete in itself within the individual: it is about
something objective. Thus, emotion is implied in a situation, for
example a situation may be depressing or threatening.

In the fifth chapter Dewey turns to the expressive object. He believes
that the object should not be seen in isolation from the process that
produced it, nor from the individuality of vision from which it came.
Theories which simply focus on the expressive object dwell on how the
object represents other objects and ignore the individual contribution
of the artist. Conversely, theories that simply focus on the act of
expressing tend to see expression merely in terms of personal
discharge.

Works of art use materials that come from a public world, and they
awaken new perceptions of the meanings of that world, connecting the
universal and the individual organically. The work of art is
representative, not in the sense of literal reproduction, which would
exclude the personal, but in that it tells people about the nature of
their experience.

Dewey observes that some who have denied art meaning have done so on
the assumption that art does not have connection with outside content.
He agrees that art has a unique quality, but argues that this is based
on its concentrating meaning found in the world. For Dewey, the actual
Tintern Abbey expresses itself in Wordsworth's poem about it and a
city expresses itself in its celebrations. In this, he is quite
different from those theorists who believe that art expresses the
inner emotions of the artist. The difference between art and science
is that art expresses meanings, whereas science states them. A
statement gives us directions for obtaining an experience, but does
not supply us with experience. That water is H20
tells us how to obtain or test for water. If science expressed the
inner nature of things it would be in competition with art, but it
does not. Aesthetic art, by contrast to science, constitutes
an experience.

A poem operates in the dimension of direct experience, not of
description or propositional logic. The expressiveness of a painting
is the painting itself. The meaning is there beyond the painter's
private experience or that of the viewer. A painting by Van Gogh of a
bridge is not representative of a bridge or even of Van Gogh's
emotion. Rather, by means of pictorial presentation, Van Gogh presents
the viewer with a new object in which emotion and external scene are
fused. He selects material with a view to expression, and the picture
is expressive to the degree that he succeeds.

Dewey notes that formalist art critic Roger Fry spoke of relations of
lines and colors coming to be full of passionate meaning within the
artist. For Fry the object as such tends to disappear in the whole of
vision. Dewey agrees with the first point and with the idea that
creative representation is not of natural items as they literally
happen. He adds however that the painter approaches the scene with
emotion-laden background experiences. The lines and colors of the
painter's work crystallize into a specific harmony or rhythm which is
a function also of the scene in its interaction with the beholder.
This passion in developing a new form is the aesthetic emotion. The
prior emotion is not forgotten but fused with the emotion belonging to
the new vision.

Dewey, then, opposes the idea that the meanings of the lines and
colors in a painting would completely replace other meanings attached
to the scene. He also rejects the notion that the work of art only
expresses something exclusive to art. The theory that subject-matter
is irrelevant to art commits its advocates to seeing art as esoteric.
To distinguish between aesthetic values of ordinary experience
(connected with subject-matter) and aesthetic values of art, as Fry
wished, is impossible. There would be nothing for the artist to be
passionate about if she approached the subject matter without
interests and attitudes. The artist first brings meaning and value
from earlier experience to her observation giving the object its
expressiveness. The result is a completely new object of a completely
new experience.

For Dewey, an artwork clarifies and purifies confused meaning of prior
experience. By contrast, a non-art drawing that simply suggests
emotions through arrangements of lines and colors is similar to a
signboard that indicates but does not contain meaning: it is only
enjoyed because of what they remind us of. Also, whereas a statement
or a diagram takes us to many things of the same kind, an expressive
object is individualized, for example in expressing a particular
depression.

Chapter Six begins with a discussion of medium. Dewey asserts that
there are many languages of art, each specific to the medium. He
believes that meanings expressed in art cannot be translated into
words. Moreover, language requires not only speakers but listeners.
Thus, in art, the work is not complete until it is experienced by
someone other than the artist. Artist, work and audience form a triad,
for even when the artist works in isolation she is herself vicariously
the audience.

Language involves both what is said and how it is said: substance and
form. The artist's creative effort is in forming the material so that
it is the authentic substance of a work of art. If art were mere
self-expression, substance and form would fall apart. Still,
self-expression is important. Without it, the work would lose
freshness and originality, and although the material out of which the
work is made comes from the public world the manner of its making is
individual.

Dewey holds that someone who perceives a work aesthetically will
create an experience in which the subject is new. A poem is a
succession of experiences, and no two readers have the same
experience. Indeed each reader creates his or her own poem out of the
same raw material. The work of art is only actually such when it lives
in a person's experience. As physical object, the work remains
identical, but as work of art, it is recreated. It would be absurd to
ask the artist what she meant by her work, for she would find
different meanings in it at different times. What the artist means in
a work, then, is whatever the perceiver can get out of it that is
living. This does not mean that any interpretation is as good as any
other, as will be seen when we discuss Dewey's chapter on
criticism.

In philosophy, “relation” generally refers to something
intellectual that subsists in propositions. But, as Dewey observes in
his seventh chapter, it refers in everyday discourse to something
direct and active. It leads us to think of the clashings and unitings
of things, of modes of interaction. For Dewey, the relation that
characterizes a work of art is mutual adaptation of the parts to
constitute the whole. This is also true for the aesthetic experience
of a city. A person who aesthetically perceives New York from a ferry
would see the buildings as colorful volumes in relation to each
another and to the sky and river. The focus would be on a perceptual
whole made up of related parts, the values of each part modifying and
modified by the values of the other parts.

Returning to art, Dewey notes that Matisse describes the process of
painting in terms of putting down patches of color, which then lose
importance as other patches are put down, so that the different colors
need to be balanced. Similarly, a homeowner furnishes a room by
interrelating the parts in perception. In general, perception consists
in a sequence of acts that build up on one another to achieve unity of
form. Art only does this more deliberately than ordinary perception.
Within art, form is the working of forces that carry an experience of
some thing to fulfillment. Thus, form needs to be appropriate to the
subject matter.

For fulfillment or consummation there must be a process of building up
values. This requires conserving the meaning of what has preceded.
There must also be anticipation of the future in each aspect or phase
of the process. Consummation is, then, relative. Dewey concludes from
his discussion up to this point that continuity, cumulation,
conservation, tension and anticipation are the conditions of aesthetic
form.

Since resistance or tension is needed for development, intelligence in
art-making consists in overcoming difficulties. The perceiver
also needs to solve problems in order to better appreciate
the work. He or she must remake past experiences so that they may
enter into the new one. Rigidly pre-determined products, by contrast,
are academic. A true artist cares about the end product as the
completion of what went before, not as something conforming to a prior
plan.

Dewey believed that the beauty of fine art involves some strangeness
or discovery that keeps it from being mechanical. This allows us to
experience the thing for its own sake. Unlike mechanical production,
in artistic production the consummatory phase recurs throughout the
work. Thus the work is both instrumental and final. Art is
instrumental not in serving narrow purposes but in giving us a
refreshed attitude about ordinary experience and contributing to an
enduring sense of serenity.

We admire skill as enhanced expression belonging to the
product and not merely to the producer. Dewey
believed that technique that emphasizes the artist is obtrusive
insofar as it does not carry the object to consummation. Properly,
technique is the skill of managing the making of form. Advances in
technique come from solving problems that grow out of our need for new
modes of experience. Historically, Dewey observes, three-dimensional
painting was motivated by the need for something more than depiction
of religious scenes. For example, the Venetian painters' use of color
for sculptural effect arose from the secularization of values which
was characteristic of their time. In general, a new technique passes
through three stages: experimentation and exaggeration, incorporation
and validation, and imitation and academicism.

Dewey asserts that new materials demand new techniques, and the artist
is a born experimenter. Through experimentation, the artist opens up
new areas, or reveals new qualities in the familiar. What is now
classic is the result of previous adventure, which is why we still
find adventure in the classics.

There is in aesthetic experience a rhythm of surrender and reflection.
We interrupt the surrender aspect to attend to the above-mentioned
formal conditions. The first, pre-analytic, phase of aesthetic
experience is one of overwhelming impression. We might, for example,
be seized by the glory of a landscape or by the magic of a painting.
This seizure is at a high level only to the extent that the viewer is
cultivated. Like Hume, Dewey holds that cultivation comes through
practice in discrimination. However he also sees aesthetic experience
in terms of phases. In this mode, the seizure phase is followed by the
discrimination phase, which can either affirm the object's value or
convince us that it was not worthy of our initial response.
This phase can, in turn, expand into criticism.

Dewey believed that there is objectivity in art evaluation based on
several factors. First, works of art are parts of the objective world
and are conditioned by materials and energies of that world. Second,
for an object to be the content of aesthetic experience it must
satisfy objective conditions which belong to that world. This is why
the artist shows interest in the world, and in her materials.

The first and most important of these objective conditions is rhythm.
Rhythm already exists in nature. The rhythms of dawn and sunset, rain
and shine, the seasons, the movements of the moon and the stars,
reproduction and death, waking and sleeping, heartbeat and breath, and
the rhythms involved in working with materials, were all seen by early
men as having mysterious meaning related to their survival. Even more
significant were the rhythms involved with preparing for war and for
planting. Dramatic events also led men to impose or introduce rhythms
that were not previously there.

Reproducing the rhythms of nature generated a sense of drama in life.
The essences of animals were brought to life in the rhythms of dance,
sculpture and painting. Combining the formative arts and the rhythms
of voice and dance led to fine art. Man came to use the rhythms of
nature to celebrate his relationship with nature and to commemorate
his most intense experiences. At first no distinction was made between
art and science in the reproduction of these changes. For example, the
first Greek stories about the origins of nature had aesthetic form,
and the idea of natural law came from the idea of harmony.

For Dewey, every regular change in nature is a rhythm. Science
progresses as we refine our understanding of these changes. Science,
however, parts ways with art when it presents rhythms through symbols
that mean nothing to perception. Nonetheless, even today science and
art have a common interest in rhythm. Man uses rhythms to commemorate
his most intense experiences. The rhythms of art are grounded in the
basic patterns of the relation of live creature and its
environment.

The art product is physical and potential, whereas the work of art is
active and experienced. It is what the product does. Dewey gives his
definition of art in this, the eighth chapter Art as
Experience. (Casey Haskins (1998) makes a case, however, for
Dewey's definition of art being found in the chapter titled “The
Varied Substance of the Arts.”) Contrary to many interpreters,
he neither claims that art is identical to expression or to
experience. Moreover, like Nelson Goodman later (1978), he asks
“when is art?” rather than “what is art?” For
Dewey, a work of art happens when the structure of the object
interacts with the energies of the subject's experience to generate a
substance that develops cumulatively towards fulfillment of
impulsions. To fully understand this definition we must understand the
role of rhythm in art. Only when rhythm incorporated into the external
object is experienced is it aesthetic. Since rhythm is a
matter of perception, not of mere regularity, it includes what is
contributed by the self.

It is often thought that there are two kinds of art, spatial and
temporal, and that only the latter can have rhythm. But, Dewey argues,
perception of rhythm in pictures and sculpture is as essential to
their experience as that of music. Rhythm is a matter of bringing
about a complete and consummatory experience. The theory that rhythm
is literal recurrence, what Dewey calls the tick-tock theory, sees it
as merely mechanical. Yet, constant variation is as important to
rhythm as is order. Indeed, more variation produces more interesting
effects, provided that order is maintained and there is progress
towards fulfillment.

Dewey explicates this point through analyzing some lines from
Wordsworth's Prelude. He notes that no one word in this poem
has the meaning we would find in a dictionary. Rather, the meaning is
a function of the situation expressed. He also believes that an
individual experience, in this case a feeling of desolation, is
constantly built as the poem develops. The meaning of each word both
determines, and is determined by, this developing experience. By
contrast, a popular gospel hymn is relatively external, physical, and
uniform in both matter and form, although even here the process is
cumulative. Although rhythm requires recurrence, recurrence is not the
same as literal repetition, for it involves relationships that both
sum up and also carry forward. These relationships define parts, give
them individuality, and connect them to the whole.

Another theory of rhythm, the “tom-tom theory,” sees it as
a matter of repetition of beats. On this view, variation comes merely
from the piling up of such uniform rhythms. The theory, Dewey
believes, is based on a misunderstanding of tribal music in which it
is forgotten that such rhythms usually occur in the context of singing
and dance and involve development to greater levels of excitement.
Also, tribal rhythms are more complex and subtle than those of western
music with its emphasis on harmony.

What subject-matter is appropriate to art? Reynolds in the 18th
century thought that only instances of heroic action and suffering
would count. However in the 19th century such ordinary topics of
everyday life as railway-coaches and plates became the subject-matter
of painting. The same democratic widening of subject-matter occurred
in the other arts. In general, one of art's functions is to question
the limitations of subject-matter set by convention and moralism. The
only limitation set is by the interest of the artist. However,
universality and originality in art depends on the artist's interest
being sincere. Whatever narrows the permitted subject-matter of art
narrows the artist's ability to be sincere and hinders his or her
imagination. This happens for example when the artist is required to
work on proletarian subject-matter, as in the Soviet Union. All of
this diversity suggests that there is some common substance to the
arts. But to say that this common substances is form is to arbitrarily
separate form and matter.

Not only is there community of form in the arts but also community of
substance, which is the topic of Dewey's ninth chapter. The creative
process begins with a “total seizure,” an inclusive
qualitative whole (a “mood”) which is then articulated,
and even continues after articulation. This qualitative whole
determines the development of a poem into parts, and when this does
not happen we become aware of breaks.

This element, which he also refers to as a “penetrating
quality,” is immediately experienced in all parts of the work.
Yet it cannot be described, or even specified. It is so pervasive we
take it for granted. It is an emotionally intuited fusion of the
different elements of the work— without it, the parts would only
be mechanically related. The organic whole is the parts permeated by
it. It may be called the spirit of the work. It is also the work's
“reality” in that it makes us experience the work
as real. It is the background that qualifies everything in
the foreground.

For Dewey, this background extends surprisingly far. Although we may
assume that experiences have bounded edges like those of their
objects, the whole of an experience, and especially its qualitative
background, which he calls “the setting,” extends
indefinitely. By “setting,” Dewey simply means the
background aspect of the experience, that which is not focused in the
experience. The margins of our experience shade into that indefinite
expanse we call the universe. However, this experiential background is
only made conscious in the specific objects that form the focus.
Behind every explicit object there is something implicit that,
although we call it vague, is not so in the original experience, for
it is a function of the whole situation. An experience is mystical,
Dewey believes, to the extent that this feeling of an unlimited
background is intense, and it is particularly intense in certain works
of art, for example in tragedy. Symbolist poets stress it when they
say that a work of art must include something not understood.

That the pervasive quality binds together the various elements of the
work is shown by the fact that we constantly see things immediately as
belonging to a work or not. That art enhances the pervasive quality
explains why we experience increased clarity in front of any work of
art we experience intensely, and why we experience religious feelings
in connection with aesthetic intensity. This sense of a world beyond
us gives us an expanded sense of self and a feeling of unity. However,
Dewey is not making a metaphysical claim here: although he is speaking
of an intuition it is not of the Absolute but of a deeper dimension of
ordinary reality as experienced.

Every work of art uses a medium associated with different organs. Art
intensifies the significance of the fact that our experience is
mediated through these organs. In painting, color gives us a scene
without mixture of the other senses. Color must then carry the
qualities given by the other senses, thus enhancing its
expressiveness. There is something magical in the power of flat
pictures to depict a diverse universe, as also in the power of mere
sounds to express events. In art media all the possibilities of a
specialized organ of perception are exploited. Seeing, for example,
operates with “full energy” in the medium of paint. Medium
is “taken up” into it and remains within the result.

Aesthetic effects necessarily attach to their medium. When another
medium is substituted, as in boards painted to look like stone, the
result looks fake. When means and ends are external to each other the
experience is non-aesthetic. This also applies to ethics when
considered from the standpoint of aesthetics. For example, being good
to avoid punishment has no aesthetic value. The Greeks recognized that
good conduct has grace and proportion, fusing means and ends.

Sensitivity to a medium is essential both to artistic creation and
aesthetic perception. Thus Dewey, like Clive Bell before him (Bell
1914), warns us away from looking at paintings as illustrations. Nor
are we to look at them in terms of technique. Both approaches involve
separation of means and ends. The medium mediates between the artist
and the perceiver. The artist, unlike the ordinary person, is able to
transform material into medium. Non-artists, by contrast, require many
materials to express themselves, and the results of their efforts are
often confused.

In his tenth chapter Dewey insists that art is the quality of a thing
and is thus adjectival. To say that tennis is an art is to say that
there is art in tennis. The product is not the work of art, rather the
work is the enjoyed experience of a human. Since art does not denote
objects it is not divided into different classes. It is simply an
activity that is differentiated based on the medium used. Artists are
concerned with qualities, and qualities are concrete and particular.
For a painter, there are no two reds because each is influenced by its
context.

Dewey is critical of various classifications of the arts, for instance
that between higher and lower sense organs, or between the arts of
space and time, or between representative and non-representative art.
He also has problems with rigid classification and definition in terms
of genus and species when it comes to aesthetics. The idea of fixed
classes is associated with the idea of fixed rules which Dewey also
rejects. Classification limits perception and inhibits creativity. As
a consequence, Dewey spends much time in this chapter discussing
specific differences between the various fine art media which will not
be surveyed here.

In his eleventh chapter Dewey expresses a wish to overcome what he
believes to be false and antiquated psychological theories that hinder
aesthetic understanding. For example, he denies the Lockean view that
the undergoings of the self are mere impressions stamped on wax.
Experience is neither merely physical nor merely mental. Rather,
things and events of the world are transformed in the context of the
live creature, and the creature itself is transformed through this
interaction. Contrary theories hold that experience happens
exclusively within the mind, fragmenting the self into sense, feeling,
and desire. However, these are actually only different aspects of the
interaction of self and environment. The separation, for example,
between intellectual and sensual aspects of the soul is based rather
on differences in social class. Dewey believed that badly ordered
societies exaggerate these distinctions, which is the business of art
to overcome.

Theories that assume that aesthetic quality is projected onto the
aesthetic object, for example Santayana's idea that art is objectified
pleasure, exemplify this separation. Although the separation of self
and object has practical importance in everyday life it dissolves in
aesthetic experience. Dewey opposes the idea, set forth by I. A.
Richards, that a painting causes certain effects in us. Rather, a
painting is a total effect arising from the interaction of live
creature and such external factors as pigment and light. Its beauty is
a part of that effect. Dewey also criticizes Kant's reduction of
attentive observation to mere contemplation and his reduction of the
emotional element of the aesthetic to pleasure taken in contemplation.
The problem with Kant is that he drew distinctions and then made them
into compartmental divisions, thus separating the aesthetic from other
modes of experience. His notion of pure feeling led to beauty being
seen as remote from desire and action. Dewey, by contrast, sees
aesthetic experience as incorporation of desire and thought into the
perceptual.

The pleasure taken in reading a poem is not in the contemplation but
in fulfillment of tendencies in the subject perceived. As opposed to
traditional psychology, Dewey holds that impulsion comes first,
followed by sensation. The presence of intense sensuous qualities
shows the presence of impulsion. Aesthetic appreciation has balance
when many impulses are involved. Aesthetic experience may only be said
to be disinterested if this means that it contains no specialized
interest.

For Dewey, imagination is not a self-contained faculty but a quality
that pervades all making and observation. It is a way of seeing that
makes old things new. Following Coleridge, he holds that the
imagination welds together diverse elements into a new unified
experience. Contrary to Coleridge, however, it is not a power. Rather,
it is something that happens when various materials come together. Nor
is it simply giving familiar experience a new look, for it only
happens when mind and material interpenetrate. The role of imagination
can be seen in terms of the dialectic of inner and outer vision in
creative making in which inner vision seems at first richer, and then
outer vision seems to have more energy, although the inner vision
controls the outer. Imagination is the interaction of the two.

Dewey's twelfth chapter draws implications from his aesthetic theory
for philosophy in general. Continuing his discussion of imagination,
he holds that all conscious experience has some element of
imagination, for imagination is conscious adjustment of the new and
the old. Yet all imaginative experience is not the same. Art is
distinguished from reverie and dream in that the meanings of art are
embodied in material. Aesthetic experience is distinguished from other
imaginative experience by the fact that the meanings embodied are
especially wide and deep. Although scientific inventions are also
products of imagination, works of art do not operate in the realm of
physical existence. A work of art concentrates and enlarges immediate
experience, directly expressing imaginatively-evoked meaning. It also
encourages its audience to carry out a similar imaginative act.

Aesthetic experience is a challenge to philosophy because it is free
to develop as experience. Thus, philosophers must go to
aesthetics to find out what experience is. Moreover, a philosopher's
aesthetic theory will test his or her ability to understand experience
itself. Aesthetic theories have typically taken a single factor and
explained aesthetic experience in terms of it, for example, taking
imagination as a single element rather than as that which holds all
the elements together. The various aesthetic theories may be
classified according to which element they emphasize. Dewey believes
that each theory imposes preconceived ideas upon the subject matter.
The make-believe theory, for example, tends to see the imaginative
experience of art in terms of reverie. Although reverie is not absent
from art, there are equally essential elements, especially the element
of creative control that causes ideas to be embodied in an object. In
art, the product must be saturated both with the qualities of the
represented object and those of the emotion expressed.

Because art often gives us a sense of increased understanding, some
philosophers have seen it as a mode of knowledge, sometimes even as
superior to science. There have been many different things suggested
as what is known through art. This shows that the philosophers
involved were not thinking about art or aesthetic experience. On
Dewey's view, the sense of increased understanding in art comes from
the fact that knowledge is transformed both in production and in
experience by being merged with non-intellectual elements. Life is
made more intelligible by art not through conceptualization but
through clarification and intensification in experience.

Dewey does not reject essences, he simply rejects previous theories of
them. He insists that essences exists even though they are not objects
in the mind. For Dewey, essence appears as the quality of intense
aesthetic experience which is so immediate as to be mystical. But it
is not to be associated with the ultimate essences of traditional
metaphysics. Following ordinary language, Dewey notes that
“essence” can also mean the “gist” of a thing,
what is indispensable. For Dewey, all artistic expression moves
towards organization of meaning that captures essences in this sense.
An example of this is the painter Courbet who conveys the essence
liquidity saturating the landscape. The work of art forms “an
experience as an experience” (Dewey 1934, p. 298). The essential
is the result of art and of artists having expressed essential
meanings in perception, and not something that exists prior to
art.

Dewey then turns to various traditional theories of art. Plato, as he
noted earlier, unconsciously borrows his idea of essence from the
arts. When Croce sees essence as the object of intuition and
identifies this with expression he is just imposing his prior
philosophical speculations on aesthetic experience. Dewey rejects
Croce's idea that the only real existence is mind and that the work of
art is a state of mind. (This comment led to Croce's published review
of Dewey and to the ongoing reception of Dewey's book mentioned in the
introduction and elaborated in the last section of this article.)
Schopenhauer is also dismissed as just a dialectical development of
Kant. Dewey objects specifically to Schopenhauer's ruling charm out of
aesthetic experience and even more to his fixed hierarchies of beauty
and of the arts. Dewey's main purpose in these attacks is to show that
philosophy also involves imagination and that art controls the
imaginative adventures of philosophy through integrating opposites and
overcoming isolation in thought.

Dewey's thirteenth chapter addresses the nature of criticism. For
Dewey, judgment is an act of intelligence performed on perception for
the purpose of more adequate perception. It is development in the
medium of thought of deeply realized experience. He rejects therefore
judicial criticism in which the verdict is central. Such criticism is
produced out a desire for authority on the side of critics, and for
protection on the part of the audience.

Dewey holds that there are no infallible touchstones in criticism. In
fact, it is harmful to think that there are such. This can be seen in
the blunders of the judicial critic, for example the attacks on
postimpressionists in the 1913 Armory show. In general, judicial
criticism confuses a particular technique with aesthetic form. This is
not to say, however, that judgment is arbitrary. Rather, good judgment
requires a rich background, disciplined insight, and the capacity to
discriminate and to unify. Judicial criticism fails because it cannot
handle new movements in art which, by their nature, express something
new in human experience.

The opposite extreme is impressionist criticism, which holds that
judgment is impossible and that all that is needed is a statement of
response. For Dewey, impressions, i.e., unanalyzed qualitative
effects, are only the beginnings of judgments. To analyze an
impression is to go beyond it to grounds and consequences. Even
defining an impression by grounding it in personal history is moving
towards judgment. Just as the artist takes objective material from a
common world and transforms it by imaginative vision, so too the
critic must attend to objective features of the work he or she is
studying. The result is perceptive appreciation that is also
knowledgeable.

Dewey believes that although there are no standards for critical
judgment there are criteria of judgment. Previous discussions of the
relation of form and matter, and of the role of medium in art, have
addressed this point. These criteria are not rules but rather means of
discovering what the work of art is as an experience. The
business of criticism is to deepen experience for others
through re-educating perception. We fully understand the work only
when we go through the same processes the artist went through when
producing it, and the critic shares in promoting this process.

Dewey holds that judgment has two main functions: discrimination and
unification. The first involves understanding of parts, and the second
leads to understanding how they are related to each other and to the
whole. The first is analysis, and the second is synthesis. The two are
inseparable. The critic gains a capacity for analysis through a
long-standing consuming interest in the subject. She should intensely
like the subject and also have rich and full experience of
it, as well a personal intimacy with the tradition of the subject's
art form. Acquaintance with the masterpieces of the tradition will be
her touchstone, although they, too, are appreciated only within the
context of that tradition. The critic should also be familiar with an
international variety of traditions, African, Persian, etc.
Lack of such knowledge leads to overestimation of some artists at the
expense of others. Since the critic will have knowledge of a wide
variety of conditions and materials, she will appreciate a multitude
of forms and will not praise work simply for technical skill. This
wide knowledge will also allow for discrimination, and for determining
the intent of the artist. The critic should also have knowledge of the
logical development of the individual artist's work.

As both critics and artists have personal areas of interest, they tend
to push the unique modes of vision associated with these areas to
their limits. Each mode of vision is associated with a method, and
each method has its own failing: for example symbolism can become
unintelligible, and abstract art can become a mere scientific
exercise. Each tendency succeeds, Dewey believes, when matter and form
achieve equilibrium. The critic fails when she thinks that her own
tendency is the only legitimate one.

For Dewey, the synthetic or unifying phase of judgment involves the
insight of the critic. There are no rules in the synthetic phase, for
this aspect of criticism is an art. Parts should be seen in terms of
their role within the larger integral whole. The critic must discover
some “unifying strand” in the work, one that is not simply
imposed on the work. There can be many unifying ideas in a work of
art, but the theme and the design described by the critic must be
really present throughout.

Danger in criticism includes reduction of an entire work to an
isolated element, for example looking at technique apart from form.
Also, although one should take into account cultural milieus, it is
dangerous to reduce works to economic, political, sociological, or
psychoanalytic terms. Certain factors may be relevant to the biography
of the artist but not to understanding the work itself. In short, (and
anticipating Monroe Beardsley) Dewey believes that the aesthetic merit
of a work is within the work, and extraneous material should
not substitute for understanding the work itself.

Nor is there any value in judging art by the philosophical position
presented. If one valued Milton for this reason one would have to
reject Dante, Lucretius and Goethe, each of whom presents a different
philosophy. Confusion comes from neglecting significance of the
medium. The material of science, philosophy, and the arts is the same:
the live creature and its environment. However, whereas science uses
its medium to control and predict, art uses its medium to enhance
experience. Dewey, in opposition to Santayana, admired Shakespeare for
holding that nature offers many meanings. The value of experience is
greatest in its ability to reveal many ideals, and the value of ideals
is in the experiences they generate.

Dewey also favors poet Robert Browning's view of the relation between
the individual and the universal. Nature manifests continuity, i.e.,
endurance through change. The critic must be sensitive to the signs of
change. Although the critic is an individual and hence has his or her
own bias, he should transform this bias into a means of sensitive
perception and insight while not allowing it to harden. He should also
recognize that there are a multitude of other qualities in the world
worthy of art. He may then help others to have a fuller appreciation
of the objective properties of artworks. Critical judgment depends on
deepening the perception of others. Its business is not to evaluate
but to re-educate perception, the perfection of perception being the
moral purpose of art. We only fully understand the meaning of a work
when we have gone through the processes the artist went through, and
the critic promotes this experience.

Dewey's last chapter addresses the large issue of art and
civilization. He begins by noting that communication is the foundation
of all activities that involve “internal” union between
human beings. Many relations between persons, for example between
investors and laborers, are “external” and mechanical, and
hence not really communication. Art is a universal mode of language.
It is not affected by the accidents of history in the way that speech
is. Music for example can bring people together in loyalty and
inspiration. Although each culture is held together by its own
individuality, it is still possible to create continuity and community
between cultures as long as one does not try to reduce one to the
other. One can expand experience to absorb the attitudes and values of
other cultures. Friendship is, on a smaller scale, a solution to the
same problem, for it comes from sympathy through imagination. We
understand others when their desires and aims expand us. To civilize
is to instruct others in life, and this requires communication of
values by way of imagination. The arts aid individuals in achieving
this.

However Dewey believed that today the arts fail to organically connect
with other aspects of culture, especially science and industry. The
isolation of art is one manifestation of the incoherence of our
society. Science gives us a new conception of the physical world. But
we also hold a conception of the world which we inherited from older
moral and religious traditions. Thus, the moral and physical worlds
are separated, resulting in philosophical dualism. Recovering an
organic place for the arts in our society is closely tied to this
problem.

Dewey believed that as the scientific method has not yet become a
natural part of experience its impact will continue to be both
external and disintegrating. Yet although science strips things of
their value, the world in which art operates remains the same. Thus
the death of art is not imminent. Moreover, science shows that man is
a part of nature. This helps man to recognize that his ideas are the
result of nature within. Also, resistance and conflict contribute to
art. So, when science discloses such resistance, it promotes art, as
it does when it arouses curiosity, enlivens observation, and gives us
respect for experience. A new unity would come with integration of
science into the cultural whole.

Dewey observes that the separation between fine art and useful art,
although it goes back to the Greeks, is intensified today by mass
production and the greater importance of industry and trade.
Production of goods is now mechanical, and this is opposed to the
aesthetic. Still, integration of art in civilization is not
impossible. Although well-constructed objects have form, the aesthetic
comes only when external form fits our larger experience. If the parts
are efficiently related, as in a well-constructed machine, the result
is aesthetically favorable. Dewey was a fan of aesthetics of modernist
design. He believed that recent commercial products have improved form
and color, train cars are no longer overloaded with silly ornament,
and apartment interiors are better adapted to our needs. Although he
admits that factories and slums mar the landscape, he observes that
the human eye is adapting to the shapes and colors of urban life. Even
objects in the natural landscape are perceived in terms of these new
forms. But, given that the human organism needs satisfaction through
the various organs, the surroundings that have resulted from
industrialism are less fulfilling than previously .

Dewey believes that the trouble is with the economic system. The
problem cannot be resolved merely through increased wages or reduced
work hours. Increasing leisure hours only reinforces the dualism of
labor and leisure. A radical social change which would allow for more
worker participation in the production and distribution of products is
the only thing that would improve the quality of experience. Increased
sense of freedom and increased control in the processes of production
would give the worker an intimate interest and hence aesthetic
satisfaction in his work. Nothing about machine production per
se makes worker satisfaction impossible. It is private control of
forces of production for private gain that impoverishes our lives.
When art is merely the “beauty parlor of civilization,”
both art and civilization are insecure. We can only organize the
proletariat into the social system via a revolution that affects the
imagination and emotions of man. Art is not secure until the
proletariat are free in their productive activity and until they can
enjoy the fruits of their labor. To do this, the material of art
should be drawn from all sources, and art should be accessible to
all.

Although this view is similar to Marxist theory Dewey does not favor
reducing art to propaganda. Indeed, he asserts that theories that see
art as directly moral ultimately fail because they see it in terms of
how we personally relate to selected works. They fail to look at the
larger context of civilization. Poetry criticizes not directly but by
means of an imaginative vision of an alternate reality. Art instructs
by way of communicating, but we need to understand such instruction as
including imagination. Moral action depends on being able to
imaginatively put oneself into another's shoes and art encourages
this. Indeed, art is more moral than morality, for morality tends to
be bogged down in convention, unless it is the product of moral
prophets, who have always been poets. If art were to be recognized as
going beyond idle pleasure or luxurious display, and morals were seen
as a matter of shared values, then the problem of their relation would
be resolved. Art is morally powerful because it is indifferent to
moral praise and blame. Dewey agrees with Shelley that morals require
going out of ourselves and identifying with the beautiful. The union
of the possible and the actual in art is continued in the moral
realm.

Dewey's ideas on aesthetics and arts have been frequently both
criticized and defended over the seventy-five years following the
publication of Art as Experience. These will be reviewed in
their order of appearance. Vivas (1937) argues that Dewey holds two
theories about the emotions' role in aesthetic experience, one that
the esthetic object arouses emotion in the spectator, and the other
that the content of meaning of art, objectively speaking, is emotion.
But, he argues, experimental aesthetics has shown that emotion is an
accidental consequence of aesthetic apprehension, and so should not be
included in its definition. The same aesthetic object can arouse
different emotional reactions in different spectators. Some trained
persons in music even deny that adequate aesthetic experience involves
emotion. Dewey also has not given an explanation of the means by which
the object expresses emotion. Vivas himself defines aesthetic
experience in terms of rapt attention involving apprehension of the
object's immanent meanings.

In a second article (Vivas 1938), he asks: Are emotions attached to
the material? How is this consistent with the idea that emotion is not
expressed in the object? And how are these ideas consistent with the
idea that emotion is aroused in the spectator? Vivas insists that not
all art arouses emotion in everyone who has effective intercourse with
it. Music, for sophisticated listeners, is often not suggestive of
emotions. When we find “sadness” in music we would do
better to call it an objective character of the music than an emotion.
Another problem for Dewey: if the self disappears in experience then
how can the object arouse emotion in the self or have emotion attached
to it? Also, if the self disappears into harmony, how can there be the
kind of disharmony associated with emotion?

I have already mentioned Pepper's objection that Dewey's theory is not
sufficiently pragmatic (Pepper 1939). His specific objection is that
Dewey's views were eclectic, incorporating elements both of pragmatism
and of Hegelian organicism. Pepper believes that both theories, as
well as formalism, can be valuable when taken separately, but that the
mixture in Dewey hurts pragmatism. Pepper identified organicism with
the view that the ultimate reality is The Absolute. Dewey replied
(1939b) that he had based his aesthetic theory on examination of the
subject-matter and not on any a priori theory. Words he used,
such as “coherence,” “whole,”
“integration,” and “complete,” were intended
to have meaning consistent with his pragmatic empiricism and did not
by themselves indicate a commitment to idealism. Moreover, it was one
of his main points that although these terms were applicable
to aesthetic matters they could not, contra the idealists, be extended
to the world as a whole. The terms had a special sense applying only
to experiences as aesthetic. Dewey rejected any theory of a great
cosmic harmony associated with the Hegelian notion of the
Absolute.

In a later work, Pepper (1945) agrees with Dewey that each reading of
a poem brings a new experience, but thinks that, since there is also
identity of context that can make the differences minor, we can speak
of an identical quality running through the different situations.
Pepper has many positive things to say about Dewey's
“contextualism” (his word for pragmatism in aesthetics),
but he insists that there is much more permanence of aesthetic values
in the world than Dewey would admit. A great work of art may be
appreciated as long as the physical work exists and someone exists to
perceive it, and insofar as it appeals to common instincts, it may
appeal to people of varied cultures.

The Italian philosopher and aesthetician Benedetto Croce read Dewey's
Art as Experience and responded to it. He rightly pointed out
many similarities between his own and Dewey's thought. (Croce 1948).
There were, however, still three points of serious contention: (1)
Croce places significantly more importance on the universality of art
than Dewey, (2) he still insists that the material of art consists not
of external things but of internal sentiments of human passions: a
characteristically idealist position that Dewey vehemently rejects,
and (3) whereas he believes that art gives knowledge of a higher
reality, Dewey does not. Croce asserts that Dewey is still arguing
against Hegelians of his youth who held, for example, to a notion of
“the Absolute,” which Croce had rejected. Dewey (1948), in
responding to Croce, argues that the list of shared beliefs Croce
mentioned in his review were just ideas widely familiar to
aestheticians. He thinks that because of Croce's idealism there can be
no common ground of discussion between them. He also makes an
unsatisfactory distinction between pragmatism, which he claims is a
theory of knowledge, and aesthetic theory, which he thinks has nothing
to do with knowledge. Also, he seems inconsistently dualist when, in
his reply to Croce, he cuts his own system into two parts, pragmatic
and aesthetic. His criticism that Croce is simply applying to the
domain of aesthetics ideas drawn from a preconceived system of
philosophy, seems unfair, since he does this to some extent himself.
In his reply, Croce (1952) argues that Dewey is too wedded to
empiricism and pragmatism and that it is only because Dewey, contrary
to his own claims, is committed to a kind of dualism, that he cannot
understand Croce's identification of intuition and expression or
recognize how similar Croce's view is to his own. Simoni (1952) argues
that neither Croce nor Dewey were Hegelian in the sense of believing
in the Absolute. Douglas (1970) agrees with Simoni, finding many
similarities between Dewey and Croce. However, Douglas does agree with
Pepper (1939) that Dewey never reconciled the pragmatist and
historicist (Hegelian) dimensions of his thought.

Romanell (1949) held that Croce and Dewey at least share the view that
art is about aesthetic experience. However, Dewey's definition of the
subject-matter of philosophy of art as aesthetic experience (which
treats it as a special type of experience) is inconsistent with his
definition of it as the aesthetic phase of experience. Also, when
Dewey speaks of aesthetic experience he is not functionalist and is
not consistent with his pragmatism. Dewey should have held that just
as there is no such thing as religious experience, there is no such
thing as aesthetic experience. Dewey (1950) replied that every
normally complete experience is aesthetic in its consummatory phase,
that the arts and their experience are developments of this primary
phase, and that there is nothing inconsistent in this. Where Romanell
sees incompatibility Dewey sees continuity of development. Ames (1953)
provides an excellent defense against Dewey's critics up to this point
in time. However Susanne Langer (1954) attacked Dewey for holding that aesthetic values must be direct satisfactions or instrumental values, conflating the aesthetic with the mundane (Kruse 2007).

As mentioned earlier, many attacks on Dewey focused on his views on
expression. Although Hospers (1946) does not specifically criticize
him, and Bouwsma (1954) does not mention him, their attacks on
expression theory can be taken to be indirectly against Dewey. Tormey
(1986) fills this gap. He chides Dewey for assuming that an artist is
always expressing something and that the expressive qualities in the
work are the result of that act. He thinks that Dewey wrongly abandons
the distinction between voluntary and involuntary expression, and in
doing so, undermines paradigmatic examples of expressive behavior. A
work of art may possess expressive qualities of sadness but this is
not necessarily the intended consequence of the productive activity of
the artist. For Tormey, the artist is not expressing him or herself:
he/she is simply making an expressive object. Mitias (1992) defends
Dewey against these criticisms.

Scruton (1974) objects mainly to Dewey's naturalism. He thinks that
Dewey insists that aesthetic need must underlie all our interest in
art, and that he fails to capture what we mean when we say that we are
interested in a picture ‘for its own sake.’ Needs can be
satisfied by many objects but one cannot substitute pictures for one
another. Unlike animal need, interest in a picture involves thought of
its object. As a political conservative, Scruton has been opposed to
Dewey's views on education. However, his work on architecture (Scruton
1979), with its emphasis on context, unity, functionalism, and the
relations between architecture and everyday aesthetics, are remarkably
similar to Dewey's views about art in general, although Dewey's name
is never mentioned.

John McDermott (1976) followed Dewey in arguing that all experience is
potentially aesthetic, where the aesthetic sensibility refers to how
we feel about our situation. Art today leads us to life. In order to
achieve consummatory experience we need to cooperate with our
environment.

Although Beardsley (1982) often speaks positively of Dewey's notion of
aesthetic experience, he thinks that Dewey was obsessed with the
dangers of dualism and that he talked about “separation”
in a misleading way. Dewey thinks the practices of hanging paintings
in special buildings would deny continuity between art and life. Yet
Beardsley sees no real problem here, for people who see a painting in
a museum bring their culture with them. Also, against Dewey's stress
on continuity, Beardsley thinks that discontinuity in nature
and in culture is required for the emergence of genuine novelty in
art. As opposed to Dewey, Beardsley stresses the ways in which art is
independent, relatively self-sufficient, and autonomous to a degree.
Goldman (2005) argues that Beardsley borrows too much from Dewey's
obscure discussion of experience, but articulates better than Dewey
the idea that aesthetic experience is a matter of complete engagement
of our faculties with both instrumental and intrinsic benefits.

Novitz (1992), who approves of Dewey's ideas that art derives from
experiences of everyday life and that the artistic process infuses our
daily lives, questions the idea that fine art always embodies
consummatory or unified experiences. He thinks Dewey has an idealized
view of art that borrows from the very aestheticist theories he
criticizes, and that Dewey does not sufficiently question the
boundaries of art.

Shusterman (1992, etc., see bibliography) is the most widely known
advocate of Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics. He strikingly contrasts
Dewey's approach to that of analytic aesthetics. Like Dewey, he
stresses the idea that art and aesthetics are both culturally and
philosophically central. Some of his most trenchant comments involve
similarities between Dewey's thought and such continental thinkers as
Foucault and Adorno. However he also has his criticisms of Dewey. He
takes Dewey to be redefining art in terms of aesthetic experience,
which he believes to be too slippery a concept to explain much.
Moreover, he asserts that although Dewey has much to say about
aesthetic experience, Dewey also holds that it is indefinable, and
this leads to problems with its being a criterion of value in art. On
the other hand, Shusterman thinks that Dewey sees defining art in
terms of experience as a matter of getting us to have more and better
experiences with art, and not of giving a definition in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions. So, although he doubts that
philosophical theory can redefine art, he suspects Dewey is not trying
to do this anyway. Moreover, he thinks it not only possible but
valuable to make less dramatic classificatory changes, as for example
in legitimating rock music as fine art. He believes that whereas Dewey
sought a global redefinition of art, he is simply trying to remedy
certain limitations in art practice. Later, he (Shusterman 2000) has
said that much art fails to generate Dewey's aesthetic experience. He
also observes that art cannot be redefined to be equal to
aesthetic experience as we are hardly going to reclassify an
incredible experience of a sunset as art. Shusterman also insists on
the value of aesthetic experiences that are fragmented and ruptured,
contrary to Dewey's emphasis on unity, and notes that Dewey neglected
the possibility of lingering reflection after moments of consummation
(Shusterman 2004). Paul C. Taylor (2002) addresses Shusterman's reading of Dewey.

Seigfried (1996b) takes a long overdue feminist look at Dewey's
aesthetics, finding several aspects that may enrich feminist
exploration of women's experiences, including his antidualism, his
perspectivalism, his working from concrete experience, his emphasis
placed on the role of feeling in experience, his emphasis on doing and
making, and his attack on the division between practice and theory.
However she notes that Dewey neglected sexism in his analysis, and
sometimes made sexist assumptions.

Carroll (2001) thinks Dewey's theory of art fails to cover many
contemporary works which then act as counterexamples to his definition
of art as experience. For example, as Rothko's paintings can overwhelm
us at one shot they may not have Dewey's requisite development and
closure. Carroll also thinks that the view that experiences of art
must be unified is too narrow. Cage's 4′33″,
which Carroll takes to obviously be a work of art, does not consummate
or have qualitative unity. Finally, he thinks that if experiences of
everyday dispersion can be aesthetic then Dewey's distinction between
“an experience” and disconnected daily experience
dissolves. However, Jackson (1998) defends Dewey against similar
criticisms, especially with respect to Cage's
4′33″ which he sees as fitting Dewey's definition
nicely. For Jackson, it is the experience that requires
unity, not the physical product.

Dickie (2001) says that Dewey sets forth an expression theory of art
without any supporting argument. Lumping Dewey with Collingwood, he
thinks such theorists place art in the same domain with the growl of a
dog with a bone. They make the creation of art like the bowerbird's
production of bowers, i.e., a result of innate natures without a plan
in mind. For Dickie, expression of emotion is neither sufficient nor
necessary for defining art. He thinks these theories wrongly hold that
psychological mechanisms in human nature are sufficient for the
production of art, as if the production of artworks is teleologically
determined by psychological mechanisms.

Freeland (2001) observes that Dewey held that art is the best window
to another culture, that it is a universal language, and that we
should try to experience another culture as from within. It is
possible for barriers and prejudices to melt away when we enter into
the spirit of another culture's art. Although this universalism seems
similar to Clive Bell's formalism, Freeland notes that for Dewey art
is defined not as form but as expression of the life of community. She
thinks however that we must also know many external facts about the
community, and that we must recognize that no culture is homogeneous:
there may not be one viewpoint in a culture. She also gives a
positive nod to Dewey's call for a revolution in which the values
leading to intelligent enjoyment of art are incorporated into our
social relations. Finally, she classifies Dewey's aesthetics as a
cognitive theory since it focuses on art's role in helping people to
perceive and manipulate reality, finding continuity between Dewey's
and Goodman's approaches to art as a kind of language.

Dewey's thought in aesthetics has also sometimes been brought to bear
in analysis of other aspects of his philosophy. Noteworthy in this
regard is the ethical work of Pappas (2008), especially his chapter
titled “The Intelligent, Aesthetic, and Democratic Way of
Life.” Here he discusses Dewey's aesthetic notion of balance as
it applies to ethics. Johnson (1994) and Fesmire (1999, 2003) also
introduce Dewey's aesthetic theories into discussion of ethics. Scott
Stroud (2011) further develops the Deweyan idea of moral
self-cultivation as self-cultivation, while Nathan Crick (2010)
applies Dewey's aesthetic ideas to a conception of rhetoric as an art
which in a democracy promotes freedom.

Recently there have been lively debates over the Deweyan tradition in
the aesthetics of everyday life. Most of the contestants are inspired
by Dewey's valuation of everyday aesthetic experience but depart from
him in various ways. Irvin (2008a) has argued that the fragmented
character of everyday aesthetic experiences might, contra Dewey's
emphasis on consummation, be what gives them their distinctive
quality. She goes so far as to assert that even scratching an itch can
be aesthetically appreciated (Irvin 2008b). Parsons and Carlson (2008)
contend that, although Dewey's aesthetic theory may seem particularly
appropriate to appreciating everyday objects since we interact with
them in a more intimate and multi-sensory way than with art objects,
this approach, shared by Korsmeyer (1999), Brady (2005), Leddy (2005,
2012), Shusterman (2006a, 2012), Saito (2007), fails to honor
traditional distinctions between aesthetic and mere
“bodily” pleasures. They might have also mentioned Kuehn
(2005) who takes an explicitly Deweyan approach to the aesthetics of
food, and Mandoki (2007) who takes Dewey as one source of her everyday aesthetics. They think it wrong that the pleasures of taking a bath, for
example, could be considered aesthetic. Rather, the objects of
everyday aesthetic should be appreciated mainly for their functional
beauty (pleasures of the proximal senses are not aesthetic, although
they may still add some value to the overall experience), and
knowledge of the function of everyday objects is required for their
appropriate appreciation. Soucek (2009) and Dowling (2010) raise
criticisms against everyday aesthetics along similar lines. However
Puolakka (2014) defends a Deweyan approach to everyday aesthetics
drawing on his theory of imagination and on recent work on Dewey and
moral imagination.

Dewey continues to have influence with respect to particular art
forms. For example David Clowney and Robert Rawlins (2014) use Dewey
to argue that risk-taking and showmanship are integral to music as
performed. Aili Bresnahan (2014) develops a Deweyan theory of performing arts practice with a special view to dance.

It is a mark of the endurance and power of Dewey's aesthetic theory
that it has been so frequently criticized and defended from so many
different angles. Although many of these criticisms rest on an
incomplete or distorted understandings of Dewey's thought there are
also many that should be answered by anyone who seeks to carry on
Dewey's legacy.

–––, 2009, “The Music in the Heart, the
Way of Water, and the Light of a Thousand Suns: A Response to Richard
Shusterman, Crispin Sartwell, and Scott Stroud ,” The
Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43: 41–58.

–––, 1999, “Replies in Search of
Self-Discovery,” in Krausz, M. and Shusterman, R., ed.,
Interpretation, Relativism, and the Metaphysics of Culture: Themes
in the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis, New York: Humanity
Books.

Additional Materials on Dewey's Aesthetics,
by Tom Leddy. [This page includes material on Dewey's aesthetics as
found in his early books Psychology, Reconstruction in
Philosophy and The Public and its Problems. It also
includes explication of material from Art as Experience not
included in the Stanford Encyclopedia article for reasons of space. It
also includes material on additional critical reactions to Dewey's
aesthetics.]

China Institute,
founded in 1926 by John Dewey, Hu Shih, Paul Monroe, and Dr. Kuo
Ping-wen.